


jesus loves me, for the bible tells me so

by blueparacosm



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Angst, Dennis has feelings, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, he has big feelings, of course he has feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 06:29:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16444604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueparacosm/pseuds/blueparacosm
Summary: Mac has wanted few things in his life: a good high or two, a black belt in karate, a game of catch with Phillies second baseman Chase Utley, and to be loved.So he gets high a lot.





	jesus loves me, for the bible tells me so

 

The bar seems quiet when he emerges from the back office, a haunt in the room.

The longer Dennis taps his fingers against the bar-top, listens to Frank crack peanuts apart while Charlie and Dee argue quietly about the special mouse in a Michelob Ultra box in the basement, the more a gaping hole in the place seems to whistle with wind. There's no voice of reason to suggest Charlie get a real vivarium from the pet store and take the stupid mouse home, no chin in hand, eye-rolling at Sweet Dee's grating voice.

"Where's Mac?"

"Who cares?" Dee snaps, pushing past Charlie to stomp down into the basement, grabbing his rat-bashing bat of nails from the corner as she goes.

"Stop, stop!" the little man squeals, tumbling after her down the sticky stairs with his hands ahead of him. "It's not a rat! It's not a rat! Dee, you bitch!"

_Crack._

Dennis looks slowly to the remaining body, and Frank wrinkles his nose, splitting another peanut. "I'm sure he'll turn up."

"Yeah," Dennis says. He tries his best to sound bored, disinterested. "Did he tell you why he took off?"

Frank shrugs, swinging his feet so his heels knock against the barstool legs. God, is he actively trying to be unbearable? "Chah'lie got to yammerin' on about me bein' his fahtha and all that shit. Mac just up and shat off, dunno."

A trash bag of yellowing letters in the corner of a closet comes to mind. Dennis knows whatever Mac's fishing for isn't going to be caught, and for a strange moment, part of his chest aches at the thought.

After all, Luther McDonald never once said that he loved him.

**━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━**  

He stares down at the kitchen table and chews his lip. This is pitiful. He should throw it all away. He should-

_Click._

The door opens quietly, and closes softer.

Dennis watches him as he toes his boots off by the door, surveys the slump of his shoulders, slanted, sad eyes cast down.

"Hey, buddy," Dennis says. It comes out gentler than he'd aimed for, embarrassingly so. Mac keeps his face turned away, moving like a ghost toward his room.

"Hey," he mumbles.

Dennis grows antsy as Mac floats closer to his doorway, predictably to shut himself inside until he can come back out the next morning all smiles again, scraping brown, burnt eggs from the bottom of a pan, scrambled out of necessity rather than preference. Dennis likes that about him, his ability to bounce back, his consistency; but sometimes when he hears Mac's trembling breaths through the walls at night, part of his chest aches at the sound.

Mac shuts his door quietly and the bed creaks slowly, and what's Dennis to do? Go in there and rock him like a baby? Blow his fucking nose for him? The least he could do is shove him into the Range Rover and escort him to a local strip club, but something tells him that won't make much of a difference tonight.

He did spend good money on this takeout, though.

"Mac," he says to the door, leaning close. "Buddy?"

A throat clears. "Yeah?"

"You, uh-" he sighs. "There's dinner on the table, if you want it." His stomach turns after he speaks. Foolish, foolish, foolish.

"Um," he hiccups. "Maybe later. Thanks." Mac's voice is rough and strangled in an unfamiliar, unnerving way.

Mac hasn't eaten all day, Dennis knows, because he forgot his breakfast protein bar on the way to work that morning, and poor, simple-minded Mac was certainly too focused on pathetically prying affection out of his deadbeat father from behind a glass to pick up anything of sustenance on his way to the prison.

The food is getting cold. Dennis clenches his jaw. Mac's hungry, he knows that for sure, and what a waste of his hard-earned money it'll be if this grease-caked garbage isn't consumed by somebody, and it isn't going to be him. He tucks a bottle of Gatorade, blue, under his arm and eases the plate onto his palm. With his free hand he turns the doorknob slowly, and looks anywhere but at the lump on the bed as he enters.

Mac's room smells like a wet hallway, like it always does, and that old crooked metal lamp on the shelf stays off. The room is cold and dark and wallpapered in posters of the Virgin of Mary and Jesus Christ and feels every bit like the kind of church whores and homosexuals die inside of. Dennis leaves the chimichanga and blue Gatorade on the bedside table, and the plate clinks when he sets it down.

Mac startles, rolling over to plant his feet on the floor from the bed's edge, wipes his eyes with his sleeves.

Dennis knows he cries, lots of people cry, most people, in fact, or so he hears; but part of his chest aches at the sight of the shimmering whites of his friend's eyes, his ruddy cheeks.

"You didn't have to do that," Mac murmurs, gives a grateful little crescent moon smile that looks like it hurts. Dennis just watches him, searching shiny chestnut eyes with something akin to tunnel-vision. There's a pain in him that he only feels sometimes, like all those years ago when he had never heard of the words selective or serotonin or reuptake or inhibitors and they were shining flashlights on his mother's rotting body. It hits him like a truck and he sits next to Mac on his disgusting bed, sheets twisted in his fists.

"You don't need him," he says, and it's hard and sharp like steel. He would have killed Luther years ago if he could get to him, and at present fantasizes about getting himself arrested and shanking the bastard between each and every one of his fucking ribs, tying him down and splitting his head with an axe, real nice and clean if he can manage it, asking him all along the way, _"Do you and his fat fucking slug of a mother think you ever deserved Mac? Do you?"_

"Huh?" is all Mac says, knitting his brows and wiping his nose on his shirt sleeve.

Dennis shifts his jaw, hands gripping the dirty sheets beneath them. "You don't need him to- to say, you know, that he loves you."

Mac makes a small, strangled noise, and Dennis watches out of the corner of his eye with a lump in his throat as the tears spill over all at once and Mac drops his face into his hands. Dennis carries on watching as he cries softly, and feels something strange inside again, something knocking around in there.

"I don't-" he gasps, and moves to lie down and catch his breath. He gets a grip within a few minutes, mumbles into the pillow, "I don't need anyone to say it. I just wanted to give him a chance to say it, if he needed to, but he's a pussy, I guess."

He pauses, looking thoughtfully at his hand resting on the pillow by his face. Dennis crawls over to the bedside table and flicks the lamp on, watches the honey light spill out onto another robed wooden figurine standing holy and pure over a cold chimichanga. "Jesus tells me I'm loved, you know? God, too."

Dennis isn't sure what he's talking about anymore, and watches as another tear rolls silent and solemn down Mac's cheek.

It's foolish, what he's doing, but that part of his chest takes over and Dennis lowers himself slowly to the putrid sheets, wedges an arm underneath Mac and all his unused bulk, and yanks his pathetic roommate to his chest. Mac doesn't respond, only lies there with a dead expression on his face, arms trapped between them. Dennis' hands hover uncomfortably over his back, but he's gone and done it now, and has to own it, or else he'll look like a bitch.

His friend closes his red-rimmed eyes and just breathes hot and slow against Dennis' chest, looking exhausted in a way that has the potential to break his heart.

Because he knows.

_They're eighteen and Dennis follows his weed dealer, some skinny, grungy kid with slicked back hair and the biggest eyes he's ever seen, into a shabby old house with dirty brown carpet. A woman that looks like a sack of potatoes or a pile of dirty laundry rocks in a recliner, tapping ash into a little homemade tray. It's a middle-school pottery project if he's ever seen one, lumpy and poorly glazed, R O N A L D carved into its side in big clumsy letters._

_"Hey Mom!" Ronnie greets cheerily, and Dennis tries not to feel awkward as she ignores him in favor of the crackling television. "How was your day?" the kid prompts anyway, waving Dennis into the kitchen and digging around in nearly-empty cabinets until he gets his hands on a pack of broken graham crackers. The laundry woman only carries on smoking slowly and rocking back, forward, back, forward. Ronnie laughs as he smooths peanut butter onto the jagged bits of cracker that are left, and Dennis feels his face screw up in confusion watching him smile, glowing in the light from the kitchen window._

_"Sounds pretty relaxing," Ronnie calls into the living room, grinning. "Mine was good too," he says, and glances up momentarily at Dennis, passing him a plate of peanut butter graham crackers which Dennis takes for lack of another option, staring down into the pale brown swirls. "Oh, this is my friend Dennis," he adds as they make their way toward the stairs, but Dennis is thinking she probably doesn't care all that much. Dennis tries to force a smile to aim at her, but she looks past the both of them as if they were ghosts; as if she had never had a son at all._

_"I'll go out and get some dinner in a few hours," Ronnie promises, leading Dennis up the short flight of stairs that ends in front of a small attic-like room full of baseball collectibles and religious tchotchkes, the only room on the second floor at all. "Love you!"_

_No answer comes, and Ronnie carries on bounding upstairs, smiling brightly as he opens his blinds and gets to fiddling with the radio to make the room more hospitable for his guest, but when he finally finds a seat on the bed and thinks Dennis isn't looking, his face falters for a moment, flickering with hurt as he stares down at his own plate of crackers._

_"Hey," Dennis says, feeling sorry for him. "Nice room."_

_Then his new friend is all smiles again and gets to chattering on about his baseball card collection in a shoebox on the old dresser._

_And part of Dennis' chest aches._

_Then they're nineteen and there's Christmas wrapping paper all over the floor of Charlie's mom's house and Dennis is holding an 80's dance-pop mixtape made just for him and Dee is running her hands over a shiny new camcorder to watch back her comedy routines and shoot her own audition tapes and Charlie is poking at the keys of a little red keyboard and Mac is smiling, smiling, smiling, says "I love you guys," and carries on smiling even if the following silence stretches on for the next thirty years of his life._

_Then they're twenty and he grabs Dennis with a sweaty hand as he's ducking into a cab set for the University with his last suitcase and says, "I'll be here next summer, or whenever you want to come home," sounding urgent, eyes wide. "I love you, man." Dennis smiles and closes the car door and watches him stand alone by the side of the road as the cab pulls away and away and away._

He knows.

They lie that way for a while, orange streetlamp light seeping in at the corners of a window covered in dust on their side and bird shit on the world's side, angels and saints and Jesus Christs oh my watching over them in this strange little moment that makes part of his chest go still and warm like a small sun.

"I know you do," Mac says suddenly, rough and tired, muffled by his friend's shirt. Dennis raises an eyebrow in question.

"You calm me down when I get all heated, and buy blue Gatorade even though you like the orange better, and sometimes you let me play Red Hot Chili Peppers in the car instead of Rick Astley, and I know you're tired of watching "Predator", and I know you threw out all those letters from my Dad because he never once said that he loved me."

Dennis smooths down a piece of hair sticking up from Mac's head because it's bothersome. "So what?"

Mac sticks one of his socked feet between Dennis' calves and presses a little closer, just carries on resting wordless in their shared warmth, face wet with tears since passed.

Dennis swallows, lowering his face to his best friend's neck and letting a wave of something strange and not unlike pain wash over him. "I love you, Mac," he murmurs into soft skin, watching the sun set tangerine and long out of the window. "I'm sorry I've never said it."

But Mac is sound asleep, and part of Dennis' chest aches at knowing it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> thots? :(


End file.
